The United States has at various times in recent history provided support to terrorist and paramilitary organizations around the world. It has also provided assistance to numerous authoritarian regimes that have used state terrorism as a tool of repression. United States support for non-state terrorists has been prominent in Latin America, the Middle-East, and Southern Africa. From 1981 to 1991, the United States provided weapons, training, and extensive financial and logistical support to the Co...

It’s weird, but in a way the US and Soviets did sort of “collude” in the sense that having a big bad scary monster to point to helped both sides to justify their actions both domestically and globally. We could claim that the commies were out to end all free market democracies, while they could claim that the imperialist pigdogs were out to destroy any hint of left leaning thinking.

Reminds me of a joke a Russian history professor once told me when he was living in the Soviet Union in the 70s. He said a fellow (Soviet) grad student looked at him on the bus one day and said “what’s the difference between the Soviet Union and America?” He shrugged and the Soviet guy said “In America, it’s dog eat dog, in Soviet Union, it’s just the opposite”!

not counting terrorism that the US perpetrates on others? people talk about laws against economic terrorism but neo-colonialism is really the most terrifying kind, and nevermind the ongoing actual colonialism, since we are, y’know, on stolen land and all

The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the doctrine expounded by United States Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick in the early 1980s based on her 1979 essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards". The doctrine was used to justify the U.S. foreign policy of supporting Third World anti-communist dictatorships during the Cold War. Kirkpatrick claimed that states in the Soviet bloc and other Communist states were totalitarian regimes, while pro-Western dictatorships were merely "authoritarian"...